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MONTREAL—Another day, another whiff of corruption, another collective groan from those who call Montreal home.

The most surprising element of the police raid on Montreal City Hall on Tuesday afternoon was that there were still residents of Canada’s second-largest city left shocked by the events.

With a televised public inquiry airing lurid revelations about the mafia, corrupted bureaucrats and political safes overflowing with cash each day from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Montrealers have built up an certain immunity to all things crooked.

But a scratch beneath the protective façade of a people who proudly proclaim themselves a little bit different than their fellow Canadians reveals that the seemingly endless string of police search warrants, gangland turf wars and rigged construction contracts has inflicted a psychological wound.

“We don’t want to have that image. We’ll be worse than Sicily if it continues,” said one woman who spoke freely about the corruption scandals that have plagued the city, but requested anonymity.

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“Today I was meeting with people … who said it’s horrible for the image of Montreal. These were people whose job it is to promote the city’s image. It’s terrible what’s happening. They have to explain it to everyone.”

The stench of corruption has been stuck in the city’s nostrils since around 2008, when reports first emerged about a sweetheart land deal in which powerful municipal officials allegedly sold a plot to property developer Paolo Catania for a song. Arrests in that case only occurred last spring and the charges of fraud and abuse of confidence will be heard next month.

But the Charbonneau commission that is deep into its task of exposing the links between Italian organized crime, construction firms and political fundraisers has shown its rapt audience that the type of corruption making headlines today has been around a lot longer.

In the wake of the Tuesday’s raid on city hall, a half dozen municipal offices around the city and the headquarters of the once-dominant Union Montreal political party, out came ex-Montreal mayor Jean Doré to recount in a radio interview broadcast Wednesday how two weeks before taking office he was offered an envelope stuffed with $100 bills by a man he would only identify by his Italian accent. The insinuation was that this was another example of the mafia at work.

The Rizzuto mafia clan of today is said to be consolidating its power and punishing those who were disloyal in the years that kingpin Vito Rizzuto was locked up in a U.S. jail. Several people with alleged mafia links have been shot dead since Rizzuto’s release last October. A fair number of others have been targeted in shootings and arsons.

But over much of the last decade, the mob was in fact busy paying off city officials with trips, wine, hockey tickets and home renovations, as the Charbonneau commission has heard. Those who didn’t succumb to favours were threatened.

“We’re an honest people, I think. But when I look at where the corruption comes from I see many Italian faces,” said one man who described himself as a sovereigntist who works in finance.

In his mind, Italian equals federalist and a federalist will pay any price to keep power so that Quebec remains a province of Canada.

“I’m not saying the problem is Italian. But I’m saying that Quebec is being run by an ethnic minority of 20 per cent anglophones,” he said.

The damage, one can clearly see, is in the us-and-them divisions, the broken confidence in elected officials not to mention the stain on the city’s reputation.

Former premier Jacques Parizeau who coined the phrase “money and the ethnic vote” to explain why sovereigntists lost the 1995 referendum, said last week that with all the damage being done to Quebec’s reputation, it might not have been such a wise decision to air the province’s dirty laundry in a year-long inquiry.

“The effects are catastrophic,” he told the Journal de Montréal. “We look like we’re all corrupt and some will say that it’s always been like that.”

Not facing up to the extent of the problems would have been worse, said Marc-Antoine Léger, a 31-year-old geographer.

“With corruption you can’t hide it away just to protect an image. You have to follow it to the end,” he said.

“We have to face the problem, we have to get it out in the open and then fix the problem—maybe not fix it, but reduce it.”

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